At Supernova last month, listening to Clay Shirky talk about the problems of collective action reminded me of a small nit I have with his excellent book Here Comes Everybody (which you should all read). He talks about the deep changes that ridiculously easy group forming online has wrought, but he also explains that most of these groups fail, in various ways.

The key to this is finding people who play the role of conversational catalyst within a group, to welcome newcomers, rein in old hands and set the tone of the conversation so that it can become a community. Clay referred to Teresa Nielsen-Hayden, who is a great example of this, and I have had the privilege to discuss this with Teresa, Amy Muller,Christy Canida and others at the Troll Whispering session at Web2Open, and heard very similar stories from Gina Trapini, Annalee Newitz, Jessamyn West and Jeska Dzwigalski at The Users Are Revolting at SXSW.

The communities that fail, whether dying out from apathy or being overwhelmed by noise, are the ones that don't have someone there cherishing the conversation, setting the tone, creating a space to speak, and rapidly segregating those intent on damage. The big problem with have is that we don't have a English name for this role; they get called 'Moderators' (as Tom Coates thoroughly described) or 'CommunityManagers', and because when they're doing it right you see everyone's conversation, not their carefully crafted atmosphere, their role is often ignored.

Which brings me back to Clay's book - in it he gives an account of the #joiito chatroom that completely misses the rôle that JeannieCool played there, making her sound like a n00b. The software tool, jibot, that has helped keep that conversation going for 5 years, was built to support Jeannie's role as conversational catalyst. I do hope he gets a chance to correct this in the next edition.

In the meantime, if your newspaper, social media initiative or website isn't working right, you need to find your tummler, geisha, animateur or conversational catalyst, but you should consider giving them a big name title like 'Chief Conversation Officer'.

Nice summation of a long thread of Net history. This role was also dubbed "host" on the Well, whose management understood its importance early on. (Derek wrote a whole book on this topic!)

Flickr's founders, Caterina and Stewart, took on this task in the early days of Flickr. It's so important to *any* attempt to build Web community/conversation that their approach -- don't hire someone to fill the "host" slot, but rather show your first-adopter users that they have a direct relationship with the folks in charge -- may well be the best, in the earliest stages at least, before it scales unmanageably... And of course assuming that your founders are in fact adroit at their hostly roles.

This is a role women have played for many years, sometimes seen as Salon hosts (like Gertude Stein) most often uncredited.

Ah yes, what to call it?I've been calling my live version of it interactive comedy, DJing people and interactive performance as well as "theatre as commons." But that's coming from a performance rather than business point of view.

More on how it works here:

http://subvert.com/media/interactive%20performance2.cwk.pdf

In a business context I've also used the phrase Open Source Management

more here (which includes a conversation with Flickr conversatriss George Oates)

http://subvert.com/blog/opensourcemanagement/

"Creating the space" is everything. This is a place where artists and performers have a great deal to teach the business world.

It is an odd mix of being "in charge" but serving the conversation rather than yourself..thus often leading to names and titles that don't sound "important" in traditional business realms. You make an important point here.

For me, I have a lot that comes with doing a "show" or treating a business meeting as one that helps escape this issue a bit.

The people who wish the be at "the top" of an organization need to reorient themselves to the centre of a conversation they need to serve. Scott makes a solid point about Stewart and Caterina's priorities making all the difference.

We've been trying to come up with a suitable title for this role at Osmosoft, where the project we're working with is open source. Obviously 'Manager' isn't appropriate in this context. In the end we settled for 'Community Advocate', partly because it's an inward facing role (where we help other people in BT understand how the community dynamics works). But it's not perfect!

I love this Kevin..why do you think I call myself a " Cloud Hostess " ? It is about creating a beautiful environment, inviting the right people to create a dialogue and then supporting the conversation in a safe way. I was raised to be a corporate wife with the skills to enable a partner amd myself to build relationships for business and social. I see this now happening in a digital salon and it is very exciting and should be even more so to advertisers who can track and interact their brand in a more interactive and emotional way.

Excellent post. It is telling that there isn't a good English word for this role. I like Simon Cast's salonniere suggestion, but I wish even more that there was a human manifestation of the native talking stickhttp://tinyurl.com/99y5rl because of the universal understanding of the sacredness of listening and advancing the conversation for all to benefit.

Anyone else remember the early days of AOL, when Steve Case coaxed the conversation along every evening? By the way, the book Digital Habitats (Nancy White, John Smith, Etienne Wenger) describes a similar role but adds tech facilitation and other things to the job description.

Great post, this is an important role in community and I think about building culture and what you describe here is someone who can help shape that culture. I think many cultures fail when the mechanics that shape the community outweigh the cultural stewards. I wrote a bit more about this here:http://experiencecurve.com/archives/community-leadership

About Me

Kevin Marks works on IndieWeb and open web tech. From 2011 to 2013 he was VP of Open Cloud Standards at Salesforce. From 2009 to 2010 he was VP of Web Services at BT. From 2007 to 2009, he worked at Google on OpenSocial. From 2003 to 2007 he was Principal Engineer at Technorati responsible for the spiders that make sense of the web and track millions of blogs daily. He has been inventing and innovating for over 25 years in emerging technologies where people, media and computers meet. Before joining Technorati, Kevin spent 5 years in the QuickTime Engineering team at Apple, building video capture and live streaming into OS X. He was a founder of The Multimedia Corporation in the UK, where he served as Production Manager and Executive Producer, shipping million-selling products and winning International awards. He has a Masters degree in Physics from Cambridge University and is a BBC-qualified Video Engineer. One of the driving forces behind microformats.org, he regularly speaks at conferences and symposia on emergent net technologies and their cultural impact.